With even more U.S. contractors now in Iraq and Afghanistan than U.S. military personnel, government officials told Congress yesterday that the Bush administration is not prepared to manage the contractors' critical involvement in the American war effort.

At the end of last September, there were "over 196,000 contractor personnel working for the Defense Department in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Jack Bell, deputy undersecretary of defense for logistics and materiel readiness.

Gov. Bill Richardson has turned down requests from state regulators, the attorney general and others to have the Legislature consider reforms of the title insurance industry, which contributed to Richardson's presidential campaign.

Advocates say legislation is needed to bring price competition to the title insurance system, which could lower closing costs for home buyers.

Richardson will not put title insurance on the agenda of the 30-day session, but the industry's political contributions played no role in the governor's decision, according to a Richardson spokesman, Allan Oliver.

The EVEREST researchers described a vulnerability in the ES&S M100 optical scanner in which simply flipping the write-protect switch on the device's CF card to "on" would result in a precinct-wide undercount that's extremely hard to detect. If this switch is activated after the polls are opened and reset before the polls are closed...the internal counts of the m100, and the paper tape reports will be correct and the system will function normally, but the counts of the votes scanned will not be added to the electronic media delivered to the central Board of Elections...

To add to the level of difficulty in detection of the exploit, while the physical ballots are in the ballot box in the correct number and the paper tape shows the correct number, the memory card is delivered to the central Board of Elections where it is read and processed. The current processes in use in most polling places are a simple review of the paper tapes, which would be correct. As such, it is likely that unless close scrutiny or recounts of the precinct were performed that surgical use of this vulnerability would go undetected. Note that this write-protect switch is apparently easy to flip accidentally.

Obviously, turning on the write-protect for the duration of a whole election would cause that machine's precinct to report "zero" votes cast, thereby tipping off election officials that something was wrong. But if a malicious precinct worker were to just reach down periodically and flip the switch on and off during the course of a day's polling, he or she could easily cause a serious undervote that would only be detected by a hand count of the optical scan ballots.

Following an internal assessment of voting machines used in 2004 and 2006, Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman fired off letters to major voting machine vendors informing them that their products had been decertified for use do the detection of serious flaws in their programming that could jeopardize the integrity of the 2008 vote count.

Listed below are the machines decertified and the primary reasons for their disqualification. Note that Precinct Optical Scanner, M100, decertified due to an "inability to complete testing threshold of 10,000 ballots due to vendor programmer errors," is the same model used in every precinct in the state of New Mexico.

Note that the ES&S iVotronic systems were decertified due to"vulnerability to security attack" and "failure to provide audit-able data to detect security violations."The iVotronic was used exclusively on election day2004in San Juan County, NM… no other NM County used this equipment. The election day undervote rate in precincts with >50% Native American populations was 5.8%. The election day undervote rate in precincts with >50% Anglo populations was 2.3%.

In addition, Colorado decertifiedSequoia Voting Systems (CO Sequoia Decertification.pdf ) for"failure to operate in a secured state requiring passwords" and "failure to provide auditable data to detect security violations." Sequoia Voting systems were used throughout New Mexico during the 2004 election. To see exactly where, check out this link.

To learn more about irregularities in the 2004 election due to e-voting, check out this study of the 2006 elections results, published onBrad Blog.

We have just learned that the PRC is hosting a forum today on Nuclear Power with speakers: at the PRC Hearing Room at the PERA building just after 9:30 am. The PERA building is located at the Northeast corner of Old Santa Fe Trail and Paseo de Peralta.

This forum comes on the heels of PNM installing a Mr. Jim Ferland, a major nuclear industry player, to head new generation development for PNM in May. During the same week that this occurred, Governor Bill Richardson began openly supporting nuclear power development.

Nuclear power development has consistently paved the way for nuclear weapons development throughout the world. Yet the Bush Administration is proposing to re-start reprocessing nuclear fuel rods, precisely the approach that enabled India, for example, to acquire nuclear weapons in three short years in the late 1960s after they pledged publicly not to (we gave them the technology on the basis of their pledge). The National Academy of Sciences recently called for putting the brakes on Bush's plan: Click here to read.

Meanwhile, industry is pushing ahead to turn New Mexico into a one-stop nuclear store: Chevron, Hydro Resources, and others are all pushing to re-start uranium mining here; LES is already building an enrichment plant near Eunice, NM, and another is proposed; A reprocessing facility is being proposed near Roswell, New Mexico. And a BTG! member heard an Association of Commerce and Industry, the most powerful business lobby in the state, say that they intend to see a nuclear power plant built in New Mexico within ten years.

Finally, the attempt by the Richardson Administration and PNM to drastically weaken renewable energy provisions of the so-called Renewable Energy Transmission Authority" suggests that this is also really about building more conventional power plants.

New Mexico, with the Albuquerque metro area leading the way, is bucking the national trend toward increasing home foreclosures.
Substantially fewer New Mexico home buyers stopped making payments on their mortgages during the first half of this year compared to last year, according to a recent report.
While foreclosures were down 30 percent in New Mexico, they were up 58 percent nationwide in the first half of 2007. The national average was one out of 134 households.
During the first six months of this year, one out of every 395 households in New Mexico was at some stage in foreclosure, according to Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac.
"Some of the larger, more populous states are driving the high national foreclosure rate," said Daren Blomquist of RealtyTrac.

National Emergency Powers: "The President of the United States has available certain powers that may be exercised in the event that the nation is threatened by crisis, exigency, or emergency circumstances (other than natural disasters, war, or near-war situations). Such powers may be stated explicitly or implied by the Constitution, assumed by the Chief Executive to be permissible constitutionally, or inferred from or specified by statute. Through legislation, Congress has made a great many delegations of authority in this regard over the past 200 years. There are, however, limits and restraints upon the President in his exercise of emergency powers. With the exception of the habeas corpus clause, the Constitution makes no allowance for the suspension of any of its provisions during a national emergency. Disputes over the constitutionality or legality of the exercise of emergency powers are judicially reviewable. Indeed, both the judiciary and Congress, as co-equal branches, can restrain the executive regarding emergency powers. So can public opinion. Furthermore, since 1976, the President has been subject to certain procedural formalities in utilizing some statutorily delegated emergency authority. The National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601-1651) eliminated or modified some statutory grants of emergency authority, required the President to declare formally the existence of a national emergency and to specify what statutory authority, activated by the declaration, would be used, and provided Congress a means to countermand the Presidents declaration and the activated authority being sought. The development of this regulatory statute and subsequent declarations of national emergency are reviewed in this report, which is updated as events require."